- Apple takes the top "prize", for having become a complete monster in every way. Not only that, but they're the only company I know of to fail to enforce correct safety earthing of their notebook chargers (as was discussed before).
- Brilliant Lighting of Australia has been anything but; aside from that rather worthless LED floodlight I mentioned in the backronym thread, a fluorescent lamp that was used mainly by my sister discoloured its plastic from purple to blue
, and the ballast got so hot that the insulation on its lead-in wires (which was irradiated PVC with a temperature limit of not the usual 75°C for flexible cords nor the now-common 90°C for fixed mains cables, but 105°C) broke down in short order. I doubt if they even have any actual engineers to be honest…
- Creative Labs of former SoundBlaster fame lost the plot when they transitioned from ISA to PCI sound cards, and they have since screwed up pretty much everything that could conceivably be screwed up.
- The Australian electrical company HPM has, to be honest, sold Hopelessly Poorly Made garbage for quite a while now: The cord grip on their model 7P extension-cord socket doesn't even work with the cable type it was allegedly designed for, the plastics they use are about as tolerant of UV exposure as IBM's Deathstar 75GXP was of thermal cycling (I have two 6-way HPM power boards/strips that have severely discoloured in less than 5 years of household usage; clearly, they can't even dream of having the centuries of lifespan that I would predict from high-quality electrical accessories), they have yet to adopt the logical surround system of Clipsal's ever-popular 2000 Series, and they seem to think 32A is safe for the highest-current variant of the Australian 3-pin plug (there are two problems with that — reliable operation at that current would IMHO require nickel-plated contacts, which they don't use, by mandate; more on that later — and circuit breakers above 20A, the most powerful variant of the plug made by Clipsal, will not adequately protect the smaller cables from short-circuit events). Overall, they're pretty much the Australian electrical industry's exaggerated version of STMicroelectronics (or Infineon); by now, you would have to pay me to take one of their products, and even then, I probably wouldn't use it (I still have a few HPM products remaining in use but intend on replacing them as soon as I get the opportunity).
- Seagate also deserves mention for losing the plot starting around 2005. Back in their glory days (Barracuda ATA III/IV/V/7200.7), their drives were reliable, consistent with HDA configurations, and had at least competitive performance, but ever since then, they've gone downhill. The 7200.11 deserves special mention for being not only unreliable, but also for the name spanning two whole generations of drive (codenamed Moose [250GB/platter] and Brinks [375GB/platter in the 1.5TB model and 333GB/platter in the smaller models]), both of which had 1TB models (ST31000340AS and ST31000333AS respectively), with their unreliability as the only commonality
- Sony has many haters, in no small part due to their draconian attempt at copy protection of music CDs — even at the cost of ruining PC users' Windows installations. Not that the company is that good at what else they do, either.
- Telstra Bigpond is, considering their nightmarish support, ridiculous prices, and unreliable hardware, undoubtedly the worst ISP in Australia — do I really need to say more?
- VIA's stuff has, in my experience, proven unreliable in the long term, and it was evidently a big mistake, in hindsight, for AMD to have left VIA to make the chipsets for the Athlon/XP/64 families.
What's also interesting is that the electrical companies of the Western world seem to have become generally complacent in their own quality standards to a greater or lesser extent (Clipsal included). I have noticed that almost every Asian-made mains cord (and every external PSU) in my stash has nickel-plated plug pins, while their Western counterparts still consider non-plated brass "good enough". The difference the nickel plating makes is easy to underestimate: The oxide layer that forms on bare brass from early on can add as much as 0.1Ω to the circuit for each pin (as measured by my DMM), while nickel-plated contacts add negligible extra resistance (even after decades of use). Presently, nickel plating is still unusual for the socket contacts — mainly because the plug pins can be touched by the user when unplugged and the socket contacts can't. (Have you ever noticed how mains connectors near their rated load always seem to get much warmer than the cables between them? This is the reason, and if nickel plating was mandated for both the plug and socket contacts, it would probably do away completely with this phenomenon. But without such a rule, I think that the 32A and maybe 25A plugs and sockets that HPM makes are, quite frankly, fire hazards in the long term.) But at least Clipsal try to make good products, unlike HPM who are all show and no go nowadays.
Instead, they recalled the power cords that came with the affected consoles, replacing them with cords with built-in Arc-Fault Circuit Interrupters (are those devices even used outside of North America?). That may have succeeded in preventing subsequent house fires, but didn't actually fix anything.
